What makes someone share something?
People share content to express their identity: their opinion, their values, their sense of humour, their own personal brand.
This means that it’s crucial to understand your target audience. To get to know them personally so that you know what type of material they tend to share with their own connections. You also need to know which of their connections are valuable to you. If you’re looking to cause ripples in the social realm, you need a firm understanding of what gets your audience going, and their audience, and even their audience! The potential reach that you could gain from Shares is ginormous.
A Share is a meaningful social signal. It takes a lot for someone to share something on Facebook. It’s far more valuable than a Like, which people can hand out generously as if it were free candy. A Share on the other hand means that the person supports the content of the post so much, they’ve adopted it as if it were their own.
You want something that you know your followers are going to react to. Often, people might enjoy your post in passing, but there’s nothing there to persuade them to engage with it any further than viewing it in their feed. You want to break their browsing habit at that precise moment, evoke some kind of emotional response, then leave a comment, a Like and even maybe Share your post with their friends. People go crazy for effortlessly, interactive content. You just have to give it to them.
Visualise your brand!
The internet is overflowing with high quality visual content. You might think that it’s going to cost you an arm and a leg to compete with big brands. Truth is, what makes something so shareable isn’t always top of the line CGI and graphic design. Most of the time, it’s not!
There’s no big secret to making something worth sharing. Which is why the most surprising of things can quickly achieve viral status. That’s the keyword here: surprising. You need to surprise people – without alienating them. That Willy Wonka meme might be funny to you, and your usage of it both intelligent and laugh-out-loud funny, but are your followers going to “get it”? Mix your content up a bit, but don’t outright confuse your fans.
BuzzFeed are known for their viral instinct. But look at this post that they released – just when everybody’s getting hyped up for the new season of Game Of Thrones. Talk about giving your readers what they want… Look at how many Shares this Facebook post received! Coupled with a linkbait article title and powerful teaser.
Stuck for ideas?
Let’s get those creative juices flowing out of you…
Quick Pics
So what if you’re not a graphic designer? So what if you can’t fit Photoshop into your budget? There are same amazing tools on the internet and they’re probably all you will ever need! Free browser-based image editing software means that you don’t have to download anything or even create an account to use its services. You just literally go on the website and create or edit your images how you please using a range of tools. Check out Pixlr and Picmonkey to get you started! Both have their different uses. Picmonkey is a bit of a clean cookie-cutter editor, but Pixlr is more of a simplified Photoshop/PaintShopPro/GIMP or whatever you would usually have to install to use. Not particularly artistic? It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Overlay an inspirational quote or message related to your brand in a fancy font over an awe-inspiring background and you’ve already produced something of similar quality to the majority of Facebook’s most popular Shares.
Newsjacking
Be quick to spot trends in the media and jump on them, relating to your brand. This is where some people would retell the tale of Oreo’s social success during the Blackout with their “dunkin’ in the dark” picture. But that story’s been done to death. And while we’re on the subject of death, ensure that your message is tasteful as well as relevant. The death of a controversial celebrity may not be a good opportunity to produce a related meme, even if you can somehow make it relevant to your brand. Unless of course, your brand’s aim is to cause offense.
Photo Collages
What’s more shareable than a photo? A collage of photos! Take your best monthly photographs from Instagram, use a free collage template and post it all over your other social profiles, giving people a quick teaser of your Instagram. Hopefully if people like your stuff, you’ll notice an increase of Instagram followers. That PicMonkey I mentioned earlier? You can upload your images there and drag-and-drop them into the empty slots of your chosen collage template. From there, there are all sorts of additional graphics you can add to the collage should you choose.
Memes
Who’s bored of memes? I’d say everyone is, but they’re still irresistible to use and they’re not going anywhere any time soon. Your meme needs to be unique to your brand for it to really succeed.
Infographics
Have some interesting information regarding your product, service or industry? Great! Think about how you could represent all that information visually. What might have been a boring blog post to both write and read could be highly stimulating and shareable in graphic form.
Puzzles
It’s surprising how many Facebook browsers like puzzles. Maybe it breaks up the monotony of their day, but I often see people sharing puzzles. Crosswords, spot-the-difference, wordsearches, riddles , and of course those “the first three words you see indicate what kind of person you are” wordsearch-inspired images. And all those types of images can quickly turn into a competition or giveaway, thus giving you more opportunity to extend your reach.
Tutorials
You may have written dozens of blog posts as an industry expert, but have you ever written a tutorial? How often have you searched on Google for instructions on how to do something? You’re also showing your audience that, not only can you talk about your subject, you can actually prove your competence with a guided tutorial. That’s how sure of yourself you are! Image-based tutorials do really well on Pinterest and Facebook, as they are more appealing to share than links.
Celebrity Endorsements
Can’t afford a celebrity to sponsor your product or service? Maybe they already indirectly are! The latest teen sensation was caught tripping over his laces? What about a simple image caption stating that maybe that wouldn’t have happened if he were wearing your brand new velcro-fastened shoes! Or something less lame… Or maybe you saw your product on a TV show? Take a screenshot and show off your product’s television appearance.
How can you use these ideas to push yourselves out there?
Any of the aforementioned ideas can be turned into some sort of competition or giveaway. You just have to find your own cause.
That awesome blog post you wrote yesterday? Are you proud enough to link to it in your email signature?
Make sure to watermark or brand your logo in all images you create for sharing, but you don’t want the watermark to be obtrusive. The point is that you don’t want something that’s visually distracting. You still want people to use and share the image, which they won’t if there’s a huge watermark masking half of it. A popular way of branding images is to layer a small translucent logo, with the URL to your website, in the bottom right corner of the image.
And what happens to your images after you’ve already shared them? Maybe others have taken to reuse them for their own websites. Try a reverse image search for your photos to see if people have been using your images in their web content. (You can use TinEye or Google Image Search for this.) If anyone has, shoot the webmaster a friendly non-demanding email asking whether they would be comfortable with crediting the image with a link to your website. If they say that they would rather not for whatever reason, consider whether the image credit is that important to you that you would request that they take down the image from their site. But if you’ve watermarked your image and it credits your website within the image itself, then it’s still like free promotion for your brand and website either way. Obviously you may have different terms and conditions for the usage of your images if, for example, you’re a professional photographer and charge for the use of your images. But maybe it’s one of those quick memes you made last week. Wasn’t the whole point of you creating it for it to be shared anyway?
Try out some of these ideas and let us know if they take off!
Or maybe you have your own ideas to share…
Leave a comment below!
